Storyboards: the Insight Scoop
In our last installment, we ended with the grand reveal of our ‘wild idea’ storyboards. But, perhaps it was a bit of a cliffhanger itself? Were you wondering what we were going to do with them? Wonder no more, we are excited to share with you what became of those storyboards and the fascinating findings we uncovered. Buckle your seatbelts; we are about to take a trip into the future!
Finding Participants on the Modern Craigs Street
Like any good researcher, we believe deeply in the importance of collaborative creation in the design process. Our intuition is only as strong as the customers’ voices we hear backing it up. And so our end goal with the ‘wild idea’ storyboards was always to present them to real users and to hear from them just how much our ideas are sticking and if our identified pain points are resonating.
To expand our research pool, we challenged ourselves to seek completely unrelated third parties. This exercise felt like a good opportunity to stretch our participant sourcing efforts particularly since we were, even if not as the end goal, trying out some ‘wild ideas’. Fresh and unbiased eyes would help keep the focus on the appropriateness and excitement of the ideas instead of on the idea creators. To find participants, we cast out onto ‘the street’. Well, a modern version of it — using Craigslist as our primary participant sourcing channel. Those who were interested in our posting were asked to fill out a Google Form Screener, from which we then filtered responses and coordinated schedules. Overall we had 40+ responses to our screener ranging from the following backgrounds:
- Age Range: 18–34 through 65+ (with majority between 18–34)
- Gender: 50% female /50% male
- Household Income: 90% between $0-$125k
- Occupations: Ranging from hairdresser to attorney, student to retiree
- Ethnicities: Wide mix of race & cultural backgrounds
Our aim was to get about 10 participants spanning a broad range of backgrounds, life situations, and experiences. Ultimately, given timing conflicts, we were able to secure 8 interviews, conducting them in pairs over a period of 10 days.
Triple C: Connection, Conversation, & Co-creation
For each of our participants, we asked them to share an hour of their time to walk through, in rapid succession, each of our six storyboards. To prevent order bias, each interviewer worked with a random set of storyboards. For each storyboard, we asked them to read aloud our context-setting “How might we” statement, then the captions under each of the Context, Pain Point, Solution, Resolution storyboard panels.
To incorporate the element of co-creation, each storyboard has two potential solutions. We asked each participant to read both, then used those two ‘alternate realities’ as launching off points for conversation, storytelling, and ideation.
We found that the ‘alternate realities’ were a great way to get participants comfortable with changing the storyboards themselves and sharing stories about how they could see those solutions being perfect to scenarios we hadn’t even considered. Communicating our understanding of relatable scenarios and problem-spaces through visuals also fostered valuable conversation around participants’ own experiences and memories they have had with the different contexts. Some memorable moments were:
- A grandfather who saw our picnic idea not just for dates, but as a great opportunity to surprise his grandchildren with a spontaneous road trip picnic
- A hobby writer who saw herself using the ‘mobile music studio’ as a connected writer’s workshop and a safe space to be with fellow comrades in a shared independent writers haven
- A seasoned commuter with an intimate relationship with driving who wished that driving on the road could be like walking down a sidewalk, able to wave at friendly and familiar faces or have those unplanned moments of micro-interactions
Putting Thoughts on the Wall
With interviews conducted, the next step was to gather our notes and look at everything altogether. Our team utilized a checker-board matrix with our different storyboards and solutions running across the top and our participant names running down the left to begin to capture and synthesize what we heard (shout-out to Cam who wrangled Miro into submission while making this board!). In addition, we incorporated a traffic-light key for positive, neutral, and negative participant reaction and a three-emoji key for overall idea impressions.
A key advantage of capturing all of our user feedback in this visual template is that we could quickly identify interesting trends across the storyboards. For example, we could see when zoomed out that some storyboards and ideas garnered a lot of conversation, some received strong negative or positive reactions.
Perhaps just as telling was what was not clear. Even though some broad brush comments could be made, it was difficult to go much further than that without digging into each conversation and the context of each interview comment. This provided a valuable reminder of how unique and nuanced each person’s experience is in and around the car and proved to further illustrate how deeply integrated the car is in people’s social and daily lives.
Itturraight, Iturrate, Iterate
And then, as we have done now many times in the past, we dove in. Going through all of the post-its as a team, we sussed out the key takeaways we were hearing from each interviewee, capturing these in blue on the side.
Then we iterated on these takeaways by looking vertically down each storyboard, searching for underlying trends heard across different participants and their stories. What was particularly interesting to us was when one storyboard generated opposing reactions to the different ideas. For example, participants loved sketching virtual fish, but were strongly apprehensive about virtual dodgeball. Why was that? What was going on?
We iterated and iterated on our thoughts, pushing ourselves to uncover the subtext behind it all, until we arrived at a handful of high-level findings. Satisfied with this stopping point, we captured these in a series of blue bubbles. Some of these that particularly stood out were:
- People value quality time and in-person experiences more than the on-demand convenience. Conflict between convenience vs commitment. Are quality time and convenience mutually exclusive? Can you have convenient, on-demand quality time (remotely vs in-person)?
- Parents want to have options to keep kids engaged in the car. Specifically, kids’ activity in the car should be calm, creative, and provide opportunity for interaction with and engagement from the parents
- People values being in charge of the social context rather than giving control to the car
- These storyboards surfaced hidden assumptions about the role people currently ascribe to the car: a tool to get from Point A to Point B safely; but can it be more? People seemed opened and excited about the potential.
A visual of our full set of blue bubbles can be found below.
But wait, what does it all mean?
You may be asking yourself at this point, now what? And that ‘what’ really is the hidden gem! Envisioning the past, present, and future of social interactions in and around cars is as broad as the sky is blue. Looking back over the last handful of sprints, we have covered a lot of ground and as this particular research phase came to its close, the underlying sense of it all, our ‘what’ in the statement of ‘what this all means’ and what we are going to try and accomplish over these eight months was starting to take form.
But, we don’t want to spill too much too early! Keep your eyes peeled for our next chapter — we may just give you a peek behind the curtain!
